The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  He stopped. He was very hot, and his pulse was throbbing in his head and in his clenched palms. Slowly his body slackened. There was a long silence, during which he could hear the buzz of a bee out in the sunshine and the gentle sound of the scythe cutting the grass.

  “Sit down, Master Fletcher.”

  He sat down. He had got to the end. He felt limp, empty, close to tears. He had made an accusation, but it was as if what he had said had been a confession.

  “Was this why you were ready to go to the stake in the same cause?” the cardinal said.

  It was not, or, rather, the reason, whatever it had been, could not be so simply put. But he was too tired, now, to look for more words.

  “Aye, my lord.”

  The silence lengthened as if neither had spoken. Across the brightness the bell in the palace yard chimed the hour. The man stopped mowing and glanced up at the sun. Then he wiped his forehead with his arm, shouldered the scythe, and walked away through the apple trees.

  They sat so still that a chaffinch, coming out of the orchard into the shade, alighted on the back of the cardinal’s chair, and then on the table, where it hopped about for a minute or two, on the cardinal’s papers and off again, before flying up and away into the heat with a quick flash of its wings.

  After a long time the cardinal said: “Master Fletcher, you are a guest in my house. I took you from Bishop Bonner because you were once a monk of the Charterhouse, and I kept you here because I thought you an honest man. Perhaps for being out of the world so long with your mind fixed upon the things of God, you have since you came back into the tug of earthly affairs seen more, and more plainly, of all that has befallen England since we were both young men than many of those to whom I have occasion to speak. You saw the abbeys pulled down, the chantries destroyed, much of the wealth of the Church taken into other hands, perhaps not to the true loss of the Church. You saw what you read in the pages of Luther take hold in other men’s souls and change them sometimes into better followers of Christ. You preached to them and taught them, and, especially when you saw them suffer for their newfound faith, you helped and comforted them. All this you saw when I was abroad or shut away in palaces seeing none of it for myself. But while I was in those palaces, in Italy, in Rome, at the Council in Trent, I saw other things, greater things, things that forced me to choose. . . Listen to me, Master Fletcher, if you are not too tired, and I will try to tell you.”

  The cardinal spoke gently, with care, as if to let him know that what he was going tell was a long tale whose end could not be understood unless all were told. He could not answer and only bent his head. He was sitting without moving, in a blessed quietness, his breathing so light that he might have been asleep, but his mind attentive, patient, a slate wiped clean. The cardinal’s words were like words of absolution.

  “Let me begin with Archbishop Cranmer’s death, since that is where you ended. I am ready to grant you that to send him to the stake was not only foolish, because of the anger it caused among the people, but also sinful, him being at the time a repentant heretic—although how heartfelt his repentance was, what happened at the last may show. But whose sin was it? The Church’s sin, you say. I say it was the sin of those who had the case in charge, the bishops’ sin, the council’s sin, the queen’s sin, my sin, not the sin of the Church. The Church is one; the Church is God’s; the Church cannot sin. By their fruits ye shall know them: you used the words of Christ as if they gave us licence to dwell in one church or another according to how we judge the actions of those who rule them. But we have no such licence. The choice is not between one church and another but between the Church and what is not the Church.

  “All men sin. The man has never lived, save Christ and his Mother, in whom God has not found cause for grief, and the sins of those who rule the Church have often been heavy indeed. I could tell you, Master Fletcher, of things I have seen in Rome. . .”

  He paused for a moment.

  “I shall tell you. We are both old men, and you are one who deserves to come to the truth by way only of the truth.

  “Thirty years ago in Rome, the very centre of the Church, there were those in high place, and even in the highest, beside whom England’s ignorant parsons, hunting abbots, Cardinal Wolsey himself, might have seemed, did seem to me, paragons of virtue. Cardinals’ courtesans displayed in sumptuous finery in the streets, princes’ bastards appointed as spoiled boys to the great sees of the world, the peace of the whole Church put at risk to advance the fortunes of the sons and nephews of popes, elderly bishops profiting from the causes of the poor who would not have been able to find their own dioceses on a map. And even now—much is better, but much more remains that is bad, wrong, wicked in the government of the Church, which is to say, but which is only to say, in those who govern the Church. The sins of the Church, like all sins, are ours, the sins of men, and to deduce from them that the remedy is to leave the Church is to reckon the Church no more than a device constructed by men, one among many possible devices, a house built upon sand. But that is not what the Church is, and the remedy is not to leave her. No, Master Fletcher, the remedy is not to forsake the Church for something else that we are pleased to call a better church. The remedy lies in the repentance and reform of the Church, which means nothing more, and nothing less, than repentance within ourselves, reform of ourselves. What more did Luther ask for, what more did he describe, than this? Until mere mortal stubbornness, his own and, alas, that of others who should have seen further than they did, drove him out of the Church and at last beyond return into the darkness where his sect is now riven with faction and sick with the cruel self-righteousness of the French and the Swiss.

  “Aye, Master Fletcher. I have read Luther too. I have felt that wind, that fire. Faith in God’s unreasonable love. Salvation for our black souls in that faith. But the wind must blow down, the fire must destroy, only our sin. Not the Church. Never the Church. Or what will become of us all, cast off from each other and from the truth?

  “When I was young I learned from the great scholars, in Oxford, in Padua. I read Cicero; I studied to write like Cicero so that one would not be able to tell a period of mine from a period of his. A friend of mine resolved to use no single word, no case of a word that Cicero had not used. We thought then that clear understanding, orderly expression, and the example of the ancients could dissolve all the ills of the world, that a man need only follow reason and live with moderation and piety to be happy on this earth and blessed after death. Our bright wits flashed over the surface of things, glittering like a shallow stream. We left far too much, almost everything, out of account. We had no sense of the deep darkness in ourselves, in every man. We had no sense of sin, and without it we could have no sense of the need for God, for his forgiveness in Christ, for his light. Yet to find that sense, to feel that need, what use is clear understanding and orderly expression, what use are Cicero and his Roman dignity? To take the first, the decisive step, what we need is not reason but faith. Luther was right, Master Fletcher, and you are right, you are all right who say that only faith saves, but at the same time. . .”

  The cardinal stopped talking and for a few minutes twisted his pen between his fingers.

  “Faith is a gift from God. But it comes to us in words, and those words have to be spoken by men.

  “Two things changed the young man I was, two things above all. I read the words, the words of Luther, the words of Valdés, the words of Saint Paul, the Letter to the Romans, the Letter to the Ephesians, the great texts of salvation. At the same time. . .”

  He smiled at the echo of his own words.

  “At the same time the command of King Henry, whom I then loved above any man on earth, forced me to study with diligence and my whole conscience the issue of the supremacy. He had taken upon himself, taken for the crown of England, supreme authority over the Church in England, and he wished me to tell him, as others told him, that he had the right of it. You know the conclusions to which I came, and you also know,
I daresay, the consequences they had for me. I lived in Italy. Many times he tried to have me killed. My family he did have killed, all but one who still—”

  He stopped, an odd sag to his face, but almost at once went on as calmly as before: “So that it was at the same time, aye, it was, that I came to understand both the saving power of faith and the necessary unity of the Church. And it was on account of both these things at once that I then began to work, as I have worked ever since, for the reform of the whole Church from within, which can be nothing else but the reform of men’s souls within her.

  “You may say, or, rather, perhaps,” he smiled, “you might have said, that the reform of a man’s soul is hidden between that man and God, that the faith which frees him from his sins, as the Gospel freed those Jews who accepted it from the power of the old law, frees him also from his need for the authority of the Church. You may say that any man who has turned towards God in the depths of his soul can henceforth read the words of salvation for himself and live alone without the intervention of the Church, in a secret peace between himself and God. If you were to say this, you would be both right and wrong.—How to put it?”

  The cardinal paused, resting his head on his hand. It was the middle of the day. The birds were silent, and in the hot sunshine of the garden nothing stirred.

  “We came close to this, on the night you were fetched from prison.

  “You would be right because from time to time there is, there can be, a gap, a breach in our mortality through which the light of God shines directly upon us. You would be wrong because at once, before we know it, time is back, shutting out the light. That man whom faith has saved is a sinner still, and he must live until he dies within the world, his resolution weak, his judgement fallible, even his faith uncertain. He must live in the world: therefore he must live in the Church, because the Church in her wholeness, with the Mass at her heart and the ancient, unbroken authority of her councils, is where Christ is in the world, since his Resurrection and Ascension to God. A man in the darkness of the world receives the light of God mediated to him through the sacraments of the Church, hears the word of God spoken to him in the words of the Church. If a man rejects the authority of the Church, where else can he look, in the world, for that light? Where else can he hope to hear the words that will rightly interpret for him the word of God in the Bible?

  “I will tell you where, Master Fletcher. Listen to me, and I will tell you what you already know.

  “He can look to other men. Or he can look within himself, to his own conscience. There is nowhere else. If he looks to other men, it may be that they are the king and his ministers, the secular power taking upon itself direction of souls. This was the authority that King Henry assumed when he removed the English Church from the Roman obedience. While he lived, King Henry preserved orthodox doctrine. But we have since seen the perils of the path he took: authority over the church in the hands of a child and thus in the hands of unscrupulous lords serving their own ends, confused clerics altering doctrine every year or two as each new voice was heard from Germany or Switzerland—and I am ready to grant that these clerics were honest men. We have seen only the beginning. If the secular power is to hold absolute sway and, without reference to the Church, authorize itself to govern by the law what men may write, or preach, or say to one another, the day may come when it will be called a crime to speak the name of Christ. Then, if by chance the past is permitted to be remembered across the darkness, men will look back to what they now think of as the fetters of the Church and recognise as most bitter slavery what they took for freedom.

  “And if we suppose that it is not the state to which we are to look instead of the Church, but other men calling themselves a new, a better church, what then? Then we are hoping too much of men no less fallible than ourselves. They have begun by calling the Church wrong and themselves right, by dividing themselves from the saints and the whole company of the faithful dead. They will go on to quarrel with each other. It has happened already in Germany. Once the unity of the Church is broken, there is no end to division and hatred, infinitely multiplied. Some of these men will no doubt say much that is true; but while they take upon themselves final authority, what they say will always be beset with dangers. Fanatics, deceivers, those who wish only for power over their fellows or for fame and wealth: how will men see them for what they are unless they judge them by the authority of the Church?

  “But, you will say, what of conscience? Is it not by looking within himself that a man may judge whom to follow, whether to stay in the Church or leave her, where truth is to be found?

  “I will give you an example of conscience at work. Those who followed King Henry out of the Roman obedience because they preferred the authority of the secular power to the authority of the pope and the councils now tell us that Queen Mary must be disobeyed, deposed, murdered even, because their consciences assure them that she is wrong to have taken England back into the Church. The authority of the Church was thrown over by the authority of the state. Twenty years only have passed, and the authority of the state is already thrown over by the authority of conscience. What pride is there! What faith of sinful men not in God but in themselves!

  “And this conscience of which they boast so bravely as their sole interpreter of God’s will, what is it? They were not born with it already made and formed. It has been formed in them by words, the word of God, yes, but spoken to them, made plain to them, by men. They cannot so lightly as they think separate themselves from the past. But their unacknowledged bondage will not last for ever. The making of consciences outside the Church has not yet gone far. Twenty years ago, fifteen even, it had not gone too far to be reversed. No Christian man is yet so far outside the Church that he has altogether lost his sense of what the Church is, as an idea, a reality in God, for all her human faults. But after a little time it will become easier, and after that, quickly, faster and easier still, to put off the past; and the weakness, the fallibility, the pride will spread like a disease. O Master Fletcher, I fear for those yet unborn, that they are already betrayed. Robbed of the truth we can but inherit, they will know their sins only as misery, and their forgiveness they will not know at all, because they do not know God. Then at last men will be free of the Church. Then they will be slaves indeed.”

  Robert Fletcher was weeping, the tears running down his cheeks into his beard as he sat looking down at the old oak of the table, the knots smoothed and blackened by time. Whether he wept for himself, for the cardinal, or for the darkness that men choose when they might choose the light, he did not know.

  After a silence, during which far away beyond the garden a boatman shouted something over the water and a woman laughed, the cardinal spoke again:

  “You will not remember all that I have said. But remember this: we are not to despair. The Church of God is an idea, a vision of wholeness and holiness where there is peace and freedom for the souls of men. But she is also a reality, a reality where every day in the hands of priests bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The Church is always obscured from us by the sins and follies of men; now more than for many ages she is hidden from us by the high walls of hatred and division. But we must have faith in her. We must, Master Fletcher. We must have faith in the Church as we have faith in Christ, for the one is the body of the other, the life of one in this world is the life of the other, given us by God to take us from time into eternity. For this faith, for this belief, I myself have—sacrificed much good.”

  The cardinal looked up. So did Robert Fletcher. Their eyes met across the table. He could feel the tears drying on his face. He wanted to speak but could not.

  The cardinal said, in an altered voice: “I shall see you again, Master Fletcher. I should like you to know also how imperfectly I too have. . .”

  He stopped. It was an appeal.

  But he rose and laid a small book, as a paperweight, on the half-written page.

  “God be with you,” he said, and, almost inaudibly, “Pray
for me.”

  As he passed behind him he just touched his shoulder. He crossed the sunlit path and went away down the quiet walk under the branches of the hornbeams. Robert Fletcher heard him disappear into the shadows but did not turn his head. His gaze was fixed on the empty chair.

  He sat without moving, listening to the stray sounds of the August afternoon. The man came back to the orchard, with a red handkerchief knotted on his head, and began again to scythe the grass.

  He sat for a long time by the sticky honeysuckle.

  At last he rose, crossed the warm brick, and in his turn entered the shadow of the pleached trees.

  When he went into the palace the servant who had taken him to the cardinal was waiting for him.

  “There’s a lad out in the court to see you, Master Fletcher, a young soldier, that won’t take no for an answer.”

  He walked through the cool rooms, brushing against familiar walls and doors as he went, and out again into the glare of the sun.

  The soldier got up from the mounting-block and crossed the courtyard to him.

  He thought, he has come to take me back. He almost turned and fled into the palace.

  “I have a letter for you, Master Fletcher. The woman who gave it to me, thinking you yet a prisoner, said to be sure and see you had it, so I brought it down from Fulham, and here it is.”

  “That was very good of you.” He took the letter, smiling with relief. “I am glad to see you again. I owe to you more—” he began, but the soldier interrupted.